Montmartre Cemetery

The cemetery you are approaching sits deep within a massive hollow, far below the surrounding street level. This sunken landscape exists because the site was originally a sprawling gypsum quarry used to extract the raw materials for Paris plaster. During the chaos of the French Revolution, these abandoned mining pits served as a convenient and grim site for mass graves. By eighteen twenty-five, the city transformed this rugged industrial scar into a formal necropolis, now known as the Cimetière du Nord.